Let's face it, the MyTouch 3G Slide was a distinctly midrange phone that existed to throw a little of HTC's quality and magic QWERTY-lovers' way. The MyTouch 4G Slide is altogether a different animal: in terms of quality, features and construction it's a counterpart to T-Mobile's flagship HTC Sensation 4G. Hardware keyboard fans on T-Mobile, rejoice. The T-Mobile G2 by HTC was a fine QWERTY Android smartphone, but it targeted business types and lacked such goodies as a high end camera, a full gamut of multimedia apps and a front-facing video chat camera. The MyTouch 4G Slide has all these and a normal, solid slider.

This HTC-made phone has a downright high quality design that reminds us of Nokia's N Series phones: it's chic and somehow Euro-cool in design. The specs are excellent: it uses the same dual core 1.2 GHz Snapdragon CPU as the HTC Sensation 4G, run Android OS 2.3 Gingerbread with HTC 3.0 software and it has a sharp 3.7", 800 x 480 capacitive touch screen. The phone has 4G HSPA on T-Mobile's network and is quad band GSM/EDGE for world roaming. T-Mobile makes much ado of the rear 8 megapixel camera with a fast f2.2 lens and dual LED flash. The camera can capture 1080p video at 30fps, and while it's no Nokia N8 when it comes to photo and video capture, it is better than most phones on the US Market.

We're pretty jazzed about the MyTouch 4G Slide, which goes on sale in stores July 27 for $199 with contract and July 19 for web orders. It's got a quality build, a solid selection of multimedia software including HTC's custom music player, an FM radio, T-Mobile TV, Netflix (yes!) and a pretty decent camera.

Here's our 13 minute T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide video review. Full written review to come in a few days.